PARSEC: An R package for poset-based evaluation of multidimensional poverty

The paper introduces PARSEC, a new software package implementing basic partial order tools for multidimensional poverty evaluation with ordinal variables. The package has been developed in the R environment and is freely available from the authors. Its main goal is to provide socio-economic scholars with an integrated set of elementary functions for multidimensional poverty evaluation, based on ordinal information. The package is organized in four main parts. The first two comprise functions for data management and basic partial order analysis; the third and the fourth are devoted to evaluation and implement both the poset-based approach and a more classical counting procedure. The paper briefly sketches the two evaluation methodologies, illustrates the structure and the main functionalities of PARSEC, and provides some examples of its use.